“That’s right.”
The woman said to him, “You know they’d really like to have one more.” Obviously I had no idea who “they” were.
“I’m aware of that,” he said. Then: “Come back to my office and we’ll talk about it. I’m Phil, by the way, and this is Andrea.” Back in his office we sat down, and he said, “The reason we’re hesitating is that we need people who can go away for a while. For a good long while, actually.”
“That’s no problem,” I told him.
“You don’t understand,” Andrea said. “We’re talking about years, maybe even decades.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind that,” I told them. “Honestly.”
(“Now you notice,” I said to Ishmael, “that neither of them said I was too young or it’d be better if I was a boy or I should really stay home and take care of my mother or finish school or anything like that” He nodded to show he hadn’t missed that important point.)
The two of them exchanged another look, then Phil asked how long it would take me to get ready.
“You mean to leave?” He nodded. “I’m ready now. I came ready.”
“That’s great,” Andrea said. “As you can see, we’re just packing up here. If you’d come an hour later, you’d have missed us.”
Now you notice that they both referred to the ad, but neither one of them had uttered even one syllable of its main word, which was teacher. This worried me a little. I wondered if the teacher angle was just some kind of lure, but I kept it to myself. Adults get real cranky if you quiz them about the scams they’re running on you. So I kept my mouth shut and helped carry boxes down to a huge Suburban parked in the alley behind the building.
An hour’s drive took us out into the middle of nowhere (an unspecified nowhere that will not be found in any maps of this region). It looked like the spot where they shot all those goofy old horror-sci-fi movies with giant spiders and killer shrews. I guess you could say it was the spot. This was my daydream, after all.
Our destination was like a small military camp with no soldiers. We drove in, and folks waved and went on with what they were doing. It was easy to see there were two groups—the Staff, who were sort of khaki and uniform, like Phil and Andrea, and the Recruits, who were sort of miscellaneous, like mall walkers on a Saturday afternoon.
Phil and Andrea dropped me off at a barracks, where some recruits took me in and assigned me a bed and so on. No one offered to explain anything, and I didn’t ask. I figured it would all come clear eventually. What actually happened, however, was that I finally said something that made it clear I was totally clueless. They were shocked that Phil and Andrea hadn’t spelled it out for me, and I said, so why don’t you spell it out? Well, they had to scratch their heads and do some hemming and hawing, but one of them finally took charge and said, “Why go looking for a teacher if you want to save the world?”
“Because I don’t know how to do it myself, obviously.”
“But what kind of teacher would know how to do it, do you think?”
“I have no idea,” I told her. This was a woman in her forties named Gammaen.
“Do you think it might be some government official or other?”
I told her I didn’t think so, and when she asked why, I said, “Because if somebody in the government knew how to do it, then they’d be doing it, wouldn’t they?”
“Why do you think people in general don’t know how to save the world?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think no one in the whole universe knows how to live without destroying the world?”
“I have no idea,” I told her.
They got stuck at this point for a while. Finally one of the guys had a shot at it. He said, “There are people all over the universe who know how to live in the world without destroying it.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. I wasn’t being smart. This was the first I’d heard of it—and that’s what I told him.
“Well, that’s the case,” he said. “There are thousands of inhabited planets all over the universe—maybe millions—and the people who live on them do just fine.”
“They do?”
“They do. They don’t wreck them or strip them bare or fill them up with poisons.”